I'm currently in the early stages of developing an Emacs major mode for the Stack Exchange Network.
I'm a little torn on how to set up the use of the API within the mode.

Is there a way to download preliminary data en masse just as email clients will download email headers?
In Emacs (and other environments, I'd assume), it's preferable to make as few network requests as practically possible, and I'd further like to not waste my user's API request limits.